Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Bad News for the Potential for Life AroundOn Exoplanets?

In 2012, two scientists published a paper which reminded us of this fact. David Spiegel, from Princeton University, and Edwin Turner, from the University of Tokyo, conducted what’s called a Bayesian analysis on how our understanding of the early emergence of life on Earth affects our understanding of the existence of life elsewhere.

A Bayesian analysis is a complicated matter for non-specialists, but in this paper it’s used to separate out the influence of data, and the influence of our prior beliefs, when estimating the probability of life on other worlds. What the two researchers concluded is that our prior beliefs about the existence of life elsewhere have a large effect on any probabilistic conclusions we make about life elsewhere. As the authors say in the paper, “Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence that the probability of abiogenesis is high, if starting from young-Earth-like conditions.”

A key part of all this is that life may have had a head start on Earth. Since then, it’s taken about 3.5 billion years for creatures to evolve to the point where they can think about such things. So this is where we find ourselves; looking out into the Universe and searching and wondering. But it’s possible that life may take a lot longer to get going on other worlds. We just don’t know, but many of the guesses have assumed that abiogenesis on Earth is standard for other planets.